The limo purred away from the kerb. Her companion stabbed a button, and under the onslaught of her incredulous scrutiny a revolving drinks cabinet smoothly appeared. ‘Wow,’ she said, deeply impressed.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked shortly.
‘No, thanks. My father was next door to being an alcoholic. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge-pole!’
He expelled his breath in a hiss. She watched his hand still and then hover momentarily before he finally grasped the whisky bottle.
‘I guess—’she began, and then sealed her mouth again as those black-as-night eyes hit on her with silencing effect.
‘You guess what?’ he finally gritted. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense!’
‘I was going to say that we don’t have a lot in common, do we? It’s a bit like meeting an alien,’ Bella mumbled, sleep catching up on her as she rested her heavy head back against the leather upholstery and closed her drooping eyelids. ‘Except even the alien might have had a sense of humour…’
Someone was shaking her shoulder hard. She surfaced groggily, registered that she was lying face down on some kind of seat, then remembered and hauled herself upright into a sitting position.
‘This cannot be where you live!’ Rico da Silva vented with raw exasperation. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’
Bella focused on the familiar Georgian square of enormous, elegant terraced houses, which had been her home for the past year. ‘Why should it be my idea of a joke?’ She fumbled with the door-release mechanism but the door remained stubbornly closed.
‘I should imagine that not one in a thousand hookers lives in a house worth millions!’
‘Hookers’? He thought she was a hooker? He thought she sold her body for money? Aghast, Bella stared at him for several seemingly endless seconds, telling herself that she had somehow misunderstood him. ‘You think I’m a prostitute?’ she finally gasped, wide-eyed with rampant disbelief. ‘How dare you? Let me out of this car right now!’
A winged ebony brow quirked. ‘Are you saying now that you are not?’
‘Of course I’m not!’ Bella threw at him in violent outrage, belatedly understanding all of his peculiar utterances. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life! You have a mind like a sewer—’
‘You dress like one—’
‘Dress like one?’ Liz’s wretched too short skirt! She wanted to scream.
‘And you came on to me like a whore!’ he condemned, without batting an eyelash.
“‘Came on to” you?’ Fit to be tied, Bella looked at him with splintering green eyes. ‘Me… come on to you? Are you crazy?’
‘You offered yourself to me—’
‘I what? You’re a lunatic… Let me out of this car; I don’t feel safe!’ she shrieked. ‘I should never have got into it in the first place. I knew you were weird!’
‘Are you trying to tell me that I was mistaken?’ His strong, dark features were fiercely clenched.
‘How dare you think I would come on to you?’ Bella spat at him like a bristling cat. ‘I never go for dark men! Your car was at more risk than you were! And I may wear second-hand clothes, talk with an Essex accent and hardly be able to spell, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have principles! It might interest you to know that I’m a virgin—’
He burst into spontaneous laughter. In fact he threw his dark head back and very nearly choked on his disbelief. Bella launched herself across the car at him in a rage and two strong hands snaked out and closed round her narrow forearms to hold her imprisoned mere inches from him and in devastating contact with every line of his leashed, powerful body.
‘A virgin?’ he queried in a shaking voice. ‘Maybe not a whore… but definitely not a virgin.’
‘Let go of me!’
For a split-second he stared down into her brilliant green eyes and something happened inside her—something that had never happened to Bella before; a tight clenched sensation jerked low in her stomach. It made the hair prickle at the back of her neck, the breath catch in her throat, every muscle draw taut. She looked back at him with dawning comprehension and horror, feeling the swell of her own breasts, the sudden, painful tightening of her nipples.
‘So what do you do on the nightshift?’ Rico da Silva probed in a purring undertone that set up a strange chain reaction down her spine.
Seriously shaken by the reaction of her own treacherous body, she remained mutinously silent.
‘And where does Hector fit in?’
‘Let go of me… I don’t feel well,’ Bella muttered tremulously, and it was true.